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'I've a seeklet to sell thee', Kevin Dee (as James Joyce)
and Stephanie Lillis (as muse and daughter Lucia) |
I was asked recently by an interviewer from Bloomsday on Broadway (congratulations to them on 32 years of Bloomsday readings), why we presented our Joyce as theatre, rather than as readings. It got me thinking.....
Bloomsday in Melbourne is, I think, unusual around the world in having been engaged in turning Joyce's text into theatre for so long (20 years). It is proud to have created original plays and/or adaptations on an annual basis, mainly because it likes the challenge of coming at Joyce from a different angle.
It's certainly true that elsewhere in the world various sections of the novel have often received theatrical treatment, and Penelope comes to mind as a favourite of actors (usually female). Melbourne remembers with affection Fionnuala Flanagan's glorious and provocative strip-tease (ever so tasteful!) at the National, and Maggie Millar's bedbound Molly, and many, many of our own (Multiple Mollies, and especially male Mollies, take a bow!). What a gift to women actors (of all ages!) is the dame from Eccles Street. Circe also lends itself to drama, but it's generally select and doable bits, like the encounter between Bloom and Bella Cohen. Melbourne's more intensive engagement ratchetted it up many notches by seeking to deal with the
phantasmagorical in the chapter (and not just the ghost), in 2010, takes a bit more doing and quite a lot of theatrical nous (
Tinteán, issue 13, p.34).
Typically, Melbourne Bloomsday has taken two approaches to the material: it writes
1. An original play (this year's,
The Seven Ages of Joyce, is a typical example;
Her Singtime Sung is another) by taking a topic and writing our own material around Joyce's fiction. Such an approach allows us to ask probing questions of him. How does the creative artist use the material to hand, in this year's case, his life, and transform it? What are the goads to creativity? What can one do artistically with intense suffering and emotions like jealousy and grief and guilt? And make living the ordinary life a celebration? Does the great writer have the right to cannibalise family and friends? Would this man have been bearable to live with?
or
2. A theatrical adaptation of a chapter or thematically linked passages from all over the novel. This approach has the merit of leading deeply into Joyce's subject matter, but it presents its own challenges, as the chapters may or may not have a good shape for theatre.
Some chapters have their inbuilt climaxes and closure (Circe and Penelope), but many do not (Cyclops, Wandering Rocks) and theatre demands at least some journey, some discernible trajectory, and a climax, if it is to rise above simple readings. One wants to send the patron out of the theatre with some form of closure, something that Joyce frequently short-changes one on, with his equivocal and sometimes abrupt endings. We've done some chapters that on the face of it look unplayable: Ithaca (1999), Oxen of the Sun (2003), Cyclops (2011), and I think they have provided much artistic satisfaction for the scripting team. Solving the problems of how to end something that is not an end in itself is inevitably a portal of discovery. Sometimes actors have themselves come up with the outrageously inevitable (the end of Oxen comes to mind).
Sitting as I do alongside directors and actors, with a view to explicating the material and filling in the background, it's always fascinating to watch productions unfold like flowers in bud, feeling the heat of the sun, the rain and buffeting winds. The same question always arises: how to make the material comprehensible to the Joyce virgin? It's a mission Bloomsday in Melbourne has always embraced enthusiastically.
How does theatre help communicability of a dense literary text? The first and most obvious answer is giving breath to words creates meaning (what's not to understand in Penelope once one supplies the breath-stops?), and
Ulysses is a triumphantly vernacular text, built as it is out of Joyce's memories of how Hiberno-English is spoken on the streets of Dublin. The music of the language is easy for actors to grasp, and although it may be unfamiliar, Melbourne Bloomsday usually use Irish accents, and mix Irish accents with others to tune up the ears of non-Irish actors, or, if necessary, invite in an accent coach. Beyond this, the language of gesture, lighting and blocking also add immeasurably to feeling states and meaning, and it cannot be ignored that Joyce often alludes to theatrical idioms of his day - vaudeville, and melodrama, in particular, and these modes are often resorted to to build climaxes. Lighting and makeup (whiteface) in particular helped contradistinguish the naturalistic in the brothel scene (Circe) from the phantasmagorical. This year, one of the many challenges is signalling a shift from the life of Joyce to his semi-autobiographical fiction based on the life. You'll have to wait to see how it's handled.
Perhaps the single most important meaning-making strategy is electing to play the text for its comedy. Too often, I find, readers and viewers approach Joyce with too much solemnity (after all, it's a great work!) and reverence. It sometimes takes a few minutes for audiences to find that they are allowed to laugh; in fact, being invited to laugh. A rule of thumb that the scripters have developed is this: if in workshopping scripts, we're not laughing our heads off, it's probably not communicating. So, the gestural language of comedy, often broad farce, is energising when bringing Joyce to the stage. A fine example of this would be the occasion when the Citizen (Jase Cavanagh) played his own poetic dog, Garryowen. The canine curse, following 'the metrical system and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn,' was truly horrifying interrupted by howls and yelps - superb comic doggerel, and a splendid sideways characterisation of the hard-drinking, anger-driven, victim-burdened Citizen.
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of staging Joyce is the mercurial character of the writing. He is the master of bathos, the quick and comically unexpected dive into the depths after reaching for exaltation, as for example happens at the end of Ch. 12, when Bloom, who has been implicitly compared to Elijah in his chariot. and Christ, in his dramatic escape at a 45° angle from Barney Kiernan's, suddenly plummets, 'like a shot off a shovel'. When it's verbal, as in that example, the humour speaks for itself, but when the change has an emotional dimension or one wants to sit with a poignant moment, it can be disconcerting for an audience, which has to be quick-witted in the first place to appreciate the transformation of the moment, or be prepared to cut Joyce slack on the twists and sudden turns of his emotional roller-coaster.The transitions from high seriousness to low comedy and back again to the loftiest romanticism we found disconcerting when playing Molly last year. Emotional states are highly labile in Joyce - they provide opportunities, however.
I may not give too much away about this year's show,
The Seven Ages of Joyce, but it's always interesting to watch actors new to Joyce slowly realise that they are dealing with sly and sometimes rambunctious comedy, bordering on farce. Bloomsday has a long tradition of not taking Joyce at his own valuation. The play we took to Dublin in 2004,
Her Song be Sung, in having characters and figures from Joyce's real life round on him and take him to task, perhaps set the scene. In this year's play, Nora and Stanislaus don't have the last word, just as his quite cruel treatment of his own father is probably not the last word on that subject either, but Joyce's unwavering conviction about his own abilities (and aren't we pleased he was not deflected from his purpose), did take its toll, especially on Nora and Lucia, and probably Giorgio as well, not to mention Stanislaus and his mother. Some pretty passionate debates are happening among the actors about the characters they are playing. Currently, Lucia is pretty angry with Nora, and marvelling at the idea of possibly being a co-dependent co-creator of
Finnegans Wake. One has to feel for the good-cop father (JJ) who is powerless to help, despite insistent strategising, and also for the mother (Nora) who is forced to be the disciplinarian in an era when a psychiatric label could be a death-sentence. The tussle between reality and desire in every life is one that Joyce knew well.
The Seven Ages of Joyce is structured around Jacques's (and ultimately Shakespeare's) designation of the seven stages of a man's life. Within that basic structure, which fits the life well (except for the fourth age when battle is with the censors and social conventions rather than warfare, though of course it deals with his flight to Zurich during WWI), we gave ourselves the liberty of moving between the life and the fiction. Joyce's life was not nearly as orderly as his systematic, highly organised big baggy monsters of novels (we range at will over the poetry,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) and the contrast in itself between the life and the art is intriguing, especially when the real-life characters are free, in a non-naturalistic play, to interrogate the architect of the fiction.
To return to the question: why put Joyce's novels on the stage? I hope because intelligent actors with a respect for Joyce's language and the astonishing perspicacity of his characterisation, and direction which can help actors unpack that, really can cast more light on works that are not easy to grasp. That's my hope, at any rate. And that's what people tell us Bloomsday does for them.
Chookas to the actors and Director. Great to see you
playing with Joyce.
